I got an odd feeling of growing old this week. No, I didn’t have a birthday or anything like that. It was when I walked into the now old Stop & Shop at Southwind Plaza for the final time last Thursday. I wondered how many people going into the store on its last day had walked into it 30 years earlier on the day it opened. I was one.

I remember waiting with great anticipation for the now old store to open back in the early ‘80s. Before that, Stop & Shop was on North Street in downtown Hyannis. The building still stands with its strange obelisk of a tower rising above it. (I have to pose the question: What was the purpose of the tower? I have asked a few people and everyone shrugs and says, “I don’t know.” If you do, contact the paper and tell us.)

Last Friday I had a few minutes before I had to be at work, so I pulled up to the new Stop & Shop and went in to check it out. I must say I wasn’t impressed. It seemed very dark inside. Maybe that’s some sort of energy-conserving measure, but the store seemed gray. I’ve been back once since and I still feel the store’s a little unappealing. It is bigger, and food stores are a necessity if you want to eat, so maybe it will grow on me.

Of course, Stop & Shop isn’t the only game in town. We have Shaw’s, which went through a minor face-lift a couple of years ago. I wonder how long it will be before they feel they have to keep up with the Joneses and get some new digs of their own.

As I said, I’ve been getting the feeling that I’m growing old. I’ve been around here long enough to remember when Main Street, Hyannis had a First National Store and an A&P, not to mention Woolworth’s, Grants, and Zayre’s.

Now I could be wrong, but I think the Stop & Shop on the corner of High School Road and North Street was the first of its brand in Hyannis. It was big news when the supermarkets moved off Main Street. Many say the Cape Cod Mall opening out on Route 132 in 1970 was the official death of our downtown. But I think when the food markets left for locations with bigger parking lots, the idea of downtown Hyannis’ being “Cape Cod’s Main Street” started its decline. (It has, by the way, never looked better, but it took over 30 years to regain that vibrant feeling.)

First National moved away from Main Street in the late 1950s but not too far as it took up the opposite corner near Stop & Shop on North and High School Road. The building is now home to physical rehab and doctor’s offices.

The Atlantic & Pacific Supermarket, aka A&P, in 1961 made a bold move, leaving Main for the newly built Airport Plaza. The early strip mall featured King’s Department Store on one end, and a truly modern A&P on the other where Staples stands today. The new grocery store had steel roller tracks on which the bagger at the check-out would put your grocery bags into plastic boxes, place them on the roller tracks and send them whooshing out a small door where they would roll outside, waiting for you to pull your car up and have another attendant put your bags into your car. That was when Kennedy was president, we were shooting Alan Shepard into space to counter Russia’s Yuri Gagarin’s trip a couple months earlier, and the new way to transport groceries from the store to your automobile felt right out of The Jetsons.

Later in the 1960s Angelos Supermarket opened on West Main Street as Hyannis’s suburbs stretched toward Centerville. Angelos was unique because it had a snack bar. The grilled hot dog was the best in town. Over the decades Angelo’s morphed into Star Market, then into Shaw’s, but the West Main store still keeps the name Star Market? Can someone tell me why that’s the case?

There was another Star Market that came and completely went. Behind the Cape Cod Mall where a vast patch of parking lot now stands grew a Star Market. It was modern, it was popular, but for some strange reason it was bulldozed over during one of the expansions of the Mall and nothing was ever built in its place. Once again, can some sage elder explain that market’s move to obscure non-existence?

There were independent stores that have come and gone as well. Love Foods sprang up in the building that Mars Department store vacated, which is now a car dealership on High School Road Ext. And there was Heartland, which was in the Kmart Plaza. It was the first warehouse-style store. I remember it was so big that small birds would fly in through the front doors and flit around the rafters for days. Not exactly the most hygienic situation.

Then along came BJ’s the Mack-Daddy of warehouse markets, where if you need five gallon jars of strawberry jam, that’s the place for you.

And now Stop & Shop has taken the high ground across the street from the warehouse store. It wasn’t a quick move; last week in this paper’s “Early Files,” the 2002 excerpt announced that Stop & Shop would again be the new kid on the Route 132 block. It took ten years to come to fruition. The only local project that has taken longer is the wind farm.

To the best of my memory of the last 60 years, that about sums up the migration and multiplication of Hyannis’ grocery stores and supermarkets. It’s kind of mind-boggling when you think about it.

Well, enough of this. I’ve got to go get some corn and tomatoes. I think I’ll check out the farmer’s market back downtown. After all, isn’t it best to buy fresh and buy local?